Running While Black: Finding Freedom in a Sport That Wasn't Built for Us

by Alison Mariella Désir

Ijeoma Oluo’s book So You Want to Talk About Race,

The name mix-up happened with other white teachers, too. None of these teachers made any overt racist comments. None of the other kids teased us or said anything. But I began to understand that the color of my skin was salient. I learned that I wouldn’t be seen as myself, an individual, and that Raisha would also not be seen as herself. We were the Black girls.

What my parents were teaching me was the truth. They were rooting me with a strong sense of pride in my Blackness in a world that would tell me I was worthless. They were teaching me to question what was presented, and who benefited from the way something—a story, history, a news article—was told or phrased.

What this meant for us, my parents would tell my brother and me, though not in the same conversation, was that we were going to have to work twice as hard as our white peers. You are going to have to be better, they would say, referring to school and education. You are going to have to be mindful of how you present yourself. The message: White people can be average and get ahead. You have to be exceptional.

I recognized it as the same sentiment in the marketing materials at Team in Training: running was “for everybody.” But the “everybody” running called to, through its media, its marketing, and its image, didn’t include us.

After the class was over, it was running that helped me sort through the pieces that bubbled up. I’d run alone along the West Side Highway, and as it had when I first started running, movement delivered wisdom. This time, it was in the form of questions: Do I hate white people? Or do I hate white supremacy? Is there even a difference? To what extent are individual white people responsible for upholding white supremacy if they, too, are ingesting and internalizing the same messages? When does it become their responsibility to recognize that they are upholding white supremacy and the status quo, and they should change it? How, though, could white people have been complicit in this for this long?

I processed all this on a run later and I saw that white supremacy harms everyone, even cishet white men. A culture rooted in dominance and hierarchy—where your identity exists in opposition to those you are made to believe you have power over—is exhausting and toxic. It puts you in the position of constantly having to prove your superiority, or another’s inferiority.

“Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”

I felt proud that our four leaders were Black women. Black women don’t come to mind when people think of ultrarunning or epic running events and yet here we were, taking up space that was largely the domain of white men. It felt radical, resistive, disruptive.

History is “fragile, easily lost, forgotten or distorted,” Gary said. “But young Black runners need to know they have many role models and are part of a rich history.”

Around me, I heard a few people say they couldn’t believe they’d finished Boston. All I felt walking through the finishing chute was relief at being done. Other marathons ranked higher than this experience for me. Rock ’n’ Roll San Diego, because it was my first marathon and represented a turning point in my life. The New York City Marathon, because it lives up to the inclusive spirit it was built on; the race was run as four loops around Central Park until 1976, when the organizers pulled it out of the park and onto all five boroughs so that more people could participate. I felt that energy when I ran it, both in the race’s spirit and in the bricks-and-mortar of each beautiful and diverse neighborhood. At Boston, I had no sense of achievement other than another marathon completed. If Boston truly was the pinnacle of running, then I would have experienced its specialness. But you have to buy into the idea of exclusivity to feel it.

What Boston showed me was just how deeply invested runners—and people in general—are in the idea of privilege. Exclusivity makes people feel good. It makes them feel special, better than others, when what it really means is that you’ve bought into an ideology of exclusion and marginalization.

Crimes committed by white people, such as the bombing executed by Timothy McVeigh, the acts of torture carried out by soldiers in Abu Ghraib, the murder of unarmed protesters by Kyle Rittenhouse, the murder of grocery shoppers by Payton Gendron, are assumed to be acts of an individual, not reflective of the white race. But if a Black person commits a crime, it is used as further “proof” that Black people are prone to such behavior. As one researcher put it, a Black or brown person “seems to be always on trial.”

In the course of conversation, I had to explain the term white supremacy to him. He thought it meant extremism, the KKK, white nationalists. “That’s not what you’re talking about, or is that what you’re talking about, or not what you’re talking about?” he said, fumbling. So I explained that white supremacy was not simply extremist views or people, but rather the economic, social, and political structure of our nation. It was the idea that white is the norm and everyone else a deviation from it. Talking to him was like doing group work in high school or college when someone doesn’t do the reading and expects you to catch them up.

The average Black person without a formal education knows more about racial issues in our country than a formally educated white person. White ignorance is part of what keeps a white supremacist system in place. If we don’t acknowledge it exists, then there’s nothing to address. White supremacy is the system that allows racism to flourish, and prevents racial diversity from being welcomed and celebrated. I often think of this quote from the hip-hop artist Guante: “White supremacy is not a shark, it is the water.”

The running collective is “come as you are,” in sweats or sweat-wicking gear. We want to dispel the myth that running is only about getting faster or that it must be about pain and struggle; running can just be about movement, community, and joy.

Simply put: consistent and intentional efforts can go a long way toward shifting the image and definition of who is a runner.

Learning and unlearning our history is a necessary part of decentering whiteness and widening the circle of inclusion. History is living and breathing in the present. It does not just explain the past, it sets the future.